Early Birds

“I think David Cameron is in much bigger doo-doo than he’s owning up to,” Chris Bryant, the strawberry-complected Labour M.P. for the district of Rhondda, was saying last week, as he sat on a bench under the soaring hammer-beam roof of Westminster Hall. For eight years now, Bryant has been a lonely, ridiculed voice against the excesses of Rupert Murdoch’s newspapers, and their thuggish collusion with British politicians and police officers. Bryant was the person who asked the Murdoch executive Rebekah Brooks, at a parliamentary hearing in 2003, whether her papers had paid the police for information. Brooks answered in the affirmative. When asked why he chose to rile the Murdoch regime, even when, as he said, “whenever anybody put his head above the parapet, they chopped it off,” Bryant recalled, “Well, I hadn’t expected her to say yes!”

Brooks resigned on Friday, after a week of being fiercely protected by Murdoch, and after she, Murdoch, and Murdoch’s son James were summoned to appear before a parliamentary committee to answer questions about their newspapers’ hacking into the voice mail of private citizens to get scoops. As the scandal spread to the United States (the F.B.I. is investigating whether News Corp. papers hacked the phones of 9/11 victims, and Les Hinton, the Dow Jones C.E.O. who has worked for Murdoch since he was a fifteen-year-old on the News of Adelaide, resigned hours after Brooks did), Murdoch published an uncharacteristically contrite apology in all of Britain’s national newspapers.

Bryant believes that his aggressive questioning of Brooks back in 2003 made him a marked man. Several months after the hearing, a set of Anthony Weiner-style self-portraits of him in a pair of tight white briefs, along with some steamy messages he had sent to a man he’d met on the Web site Gaydar, appeared in the pages of several tabloids. Over the years, the tabloids continued to give Bryant hell: “VOTERS MUST GIVE CHRIS BRYANT A RHONDDA ROGERING,” read a typical headline in Murdoch’s Sun. The Times (also Murdoch-owned) published a profile of Bryant titled “BLAIR’S ATTACK POODLE SAYS PANTS TO THE LOT OF YOU,” which included a blind quote calling Bryant a “bumptious little berk.” Bryant continued to flout the omertà. He told the Evening Standard recently, “I don’t give a monkey’s fart.” His was among the thirty-eight hundred and seventy names found in files belonging to Glenn Mulcaire, a private investigator employed by News of the World. He made a largely ignored speech about phonehacking in 2010. In March, he called upon a nearly deserted Commons chamber to investigate the allegations. The past few weeks have been a vindication, but Bryant seemed more relieved than celebratory. “I got monstered by the press,” he said. “It’s not been very pleasant.”

Earlier that day, Bryant had bumped into Lord Stevenson of Balmacara, a former adviser to Gordon Brown. Stevenson had asked him how it was going.

“It’s good, but tiring,” Bryant answered.

“Keep it up,” Stevenson said.

Rebekah Brooks, a week before she resigned, had said that it was “inconceivable” that she would have known that N.O.T.W. had hacked the voice mail of Milly Dowler, a thirteen-year-old who was murdered in 2002. After Brooks resigned, Bryant wrote that it was “‘inconceivable’ that she didn’t know what was going on in her paper.” He added, “If she did know, she’s been lying all this time—and if she didn’t she’s been culpably negligent.”

Along with Bryant, Charlotte Harris, a partner in the law firm Mishcon de Reya, has been to the phone-hacking scandal what Meredith Whitney was to the financial crisis—she called it loud and early. She is thirty-four and blond, and is prone to making such self-dramatizing remarks as “It’s difficult when everyone’s older than you, and most of them are boys.” Harris was breaking for a steak lunch near her office in Holborn. She got involved in the phone-hacking scandal—which Brits had taken to calling Omnigate, as it seemed to ensnare almost everyone in the country’s public life—in early 2007, as an associate lawyer in Manchester. Her boss, Mark Lewis, was the lawyer for Gordon Taylor, the head of the Professional Footballers’ Association. Taylor’s phone was hacked by Glenn Mulcaire; Lewis and Harris won their client a reported four-hundred-and-fifty-thousand-pound settlement. “It was clear then that this was wider than one rogue reporter,” said Harris, who was on maternity leave when the case settled. “I remember hearing the news, looking at my new baby in her bouncy thing, and thinking, Oh, I wanted a trial.” Harris’s next phone-hacking client was the public-relations impresario Max Clifford. She won him a million pounds, if not the same sort of public outrage that the Milly Dowler revelations provoked. “Max basically taught me things that only Max can teach you,” Harris said. “By the time I got other clients, I was able to say, ‘Don’t be scared. Let’s get on with it.’ ”

Harris thinks that the Milly Dowler case tipped public opinion. “It gave people permission to be angry. There isn’t really any discussion to be had about why it would be O.K. to hack into the voice mail of a murdered schoolchild and muck up the police investigation.” She went on, “I don’t know if we’ll ever get to the bottom of how bad it really was.”

In a strange way, the closure of News of the World, her longtime nemesis, had unsettled Harris. “It’s a bit like being on the battlefield, all these bodies lying around, and you look at all the waste and the destruction, and think it really shouldn’t have happened at all.” She went on, “I’ve been litigating against News of the World my entire career, and, despite everything that’s happened, you get to know people.” The paper’s abrupt disappearance, Harris said, was as unsatisfying as that of a bad boyfriend. “It’s like catching somebody red-handed, and he says, ‘Fine, I’m leaving,’ and walks out the door.” She took a bite of rib-eye. “It would have been nice to stay and make him change.”

At Westminster Hall, Chris Bryant indulged in a moment of goofy release when asked if Murdoch, after everything that had happened, would still be able to intimidate British politicians. He held two thumbs together, forefingers up, in a W shape, and then turned them upside down: “Frankly, now it’s like ‘Whatever, Mary.’ ” That afternoon, Murdoch announced that he would withdraw his twelve-billion-dollar bid for the satellite broadcasting company BSkyB. Bryant is looking forward to next week, when the two Murdochs and Brooks are to testify in front of the parliamentary committee. He said, “If the Murdochs themselves don’t turn up at the select committee, they will be kissing Britain goodbye.” Later that day, he was supposed to lead a debate in the House of Commons on an unrelated bill. He excused himself, saying, “I’ve done bugger-all to prepare for it.” ♦

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